So we talked about weird-ass 1.8″ drives, and now let’s look at the other end of the spectrum. Dell has been putting these out on servers lately. I especially like them on the T350 tower server line. There’s a barely-perceptible opening on the faceplate where the carrier bracket slides out.
It’s the BOSS-S2 module. A weirdly engineered, SATA connected M.2 controller. What’s weird about it, you ask? Well, the module has two slots for a pair of M.2 carrier cards mounted in opposite orientations. The module has a built-in RAID controller, which makes it perfect for an OS boot “drive.” A pair of M.2 drives in a RAID 1 configuration makes a great choice, and frees up all your front-panel drives for storage.
One of our members picked up a server for a homelab recently. It was a good deal, an R730XD populated with a decent amount of RAM, two SSDs for OS boot, and eight spinny drives for storage. I helped set it up.
It was ready to party right out of the box, and we installed ESXi on it right away. But the server was outfitted with something I’ve never seen before.
So let’s count the drive bays on this monstrosity. 2x 2.5″ bays in the back (for the boot SSDs) — this is actually a great arrangement in my opinion, to keep them separate from the storage drives. On the front, two rows of four (or is it four columns of two?) totalling 8x 3.5″ drive bays. I like 3.5″ drives for storage, because you can fill it up with the 12Gbps high-capacity SAS drives, and they’re super-affordable.
What’s weird about that? Wait for it…
Above the 8x 3.5″ drive bays are 18x (!?!?!?!?!?) 1.8″ drive bays (?!?!?!?!?!?!). First of all, I’ve been doing this for a minute. What the fuck are 1.8″ drives? They must have gone obsolete as soon as they were released, because I’d never seen them before.
I’ve found these Lanner 1U network appliances incredibly useful. Nice small factor, lots of network ports to do fun things with. They make fantastic Linux routing appliances. They’re kind of old-school, though, they have these LCD panel modules with four buttons.
I’ve been using them off-label for so long I can’t even remember what the panels were originally for.
See, the first thing I do is connect serial, boot to USB and install something modern on it. Rocky, Ubuntu, whatever.
Last week I went to explore the LCD panels, and see if I could make use of them. Maybe as a periodic status display or something. For the first time in years, I consulted the actual manual for these devices. It turns out, they’re connected to the motherboard internally via an internal parallel port.
The manual suggests using the drivers found at https://github.com/majodu/plcm_drv_v013 but they are so old they’re meant for Linux kernel 3 and below. So the first thing I did was clone the repository. After looking at it for a few minutes I realized I didn’t need everything it was delivering, I just needed the kernel module itself, which is compiled via the “boot” argument. Looking at the Makefile it was pretty clear what the logic was in “boot:”
So the first thing I did, since my installed platform used kernel 5, was change the KVERS3 line to ifeq ($(KVER3),5) so that it would run the make on my kernel.
I was able to compile the kernel module. It barked at something else it was trying to install, but since all I really needed was the test executable and the kernel module for now, I ignored that.
Then I ran into an issue loading the newly-created kernel module. It didn’t like the major number associated with the driver, 248. Looking at /proc/devices I could see that 248 was in use by ptp, so I edited the Makefile and plcm_drv.c to use 239 instead, since that was available. I recompiled, and was able to load that kernel module just fine. After that, the plcm_test executable successfully ran and displayed stuff on the LCD panel and accepted button presses.
Good enough for now, at least I know I can write something in C to display something and receive button presses. Now to think through a good use case for this silly hoop I just jumped through…
We’re eight classes in on our MicroPython & PCB Design series, and I got the urge to give some stuff away to drive more eyeballs to our content. So from now until the end of December, I’m tracking new subscribers to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbN6uet3koyKkKs5W8CoCxQ
Five of you will win prizes:
(1) Tarot Badge from DC30 (1) Tree of Life Badge from DC29 (3) Random DIY PCB kits from our collection
What better way to spend Black Friday evening than cozying up by the fire and tuning into DC540’s catch-up class on MicroPython & PCB Design. We’ve done 7 classes so far of a planned 6-class series, and last week we started in fabrication prep. Enough people are traveling this week that we decided not to take the class forward this evening, but enough people are around that we’re going to hold “class” anyway, and dig deep in whatever direction folks want to explore.
No promises about next week. I’m having minor ear surgery next Friday morning. We’ll see how it goes.
So I finally caught up with all the last few weeks of class videos, and they’re all out there on the YouTube playlist. We’re having such a great time working through this process, dealing with real-time mistakes, and just going through the grind of designing a board and getting it fabricated. It’s a group class, so it’s very conversational, and the group is comfortable together, so it occasionally gets irreverent and mildly sarcastic.
Here’s the YouTube playlist link: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvHfoRwREM9NEh0unEx78AdT5MzEejzg7
I expect we’ll have one or two more classes before we wrap this series up. Hit us up on all the platforms if you find it useful.
I was tasked with reclaiming some decommissioned network appliances. More specifically, some pretty decent Lanner appliances. Multiple ethernet interfaces, 16GB RAM, and a decent processor.
Fun, right? Well….
No access, no passwords. They have IPMI, but we don’t have passwords for that either.
We have access to serial, but all that gives us is access to BIOS, and then a boot failure, ostensibly because they’ve been wiped.
So I fought with this in several directions before coming up with a possible solution.
Wrestle with BIOS until I can get it to PXE boot. Set it to PXE from LAN0. Boot it, see what MAC address it comes up with. Add that MAC to my FOG server and deploy an image via FOG. In my case, I imaged it with Rocky Linux 8.4.
Then, because it’s still unconfigured, incomplete and flying blind, go back to serial, boot to the hard disk, edit the grub menu entry to add “console=ttyS0,115200” to the linux line, then let her rip. Sure enough, it’s now fully booting to serial and I’m able to IP it, set up permanent console redirection, make sure sshd is starting, and boom.
I probably could have done mostly the same thing with a USB boot disk, but then I’m stuck doing a full install, whereas using FOG gives me an already-standardized image. Now I’ll be done with this stack in about two bourbons.
Thanks for all the support! It’s been quite the ride creating this badge and fulfilling the orders. We’ve learned quite a bit — about design, soldering, group projects, logistics and fulfillment. There’ll be a lessons learned post soon, I’ll probably write that while we wait for boards and lanyards for the next batch.
Well that was quick enough results. Demand seems to support opening up preorders again. I know it’s annoying to stalk a shop for restocks. OK, there are 40 in the shop for preorders. Shipping is mid-September. I’ll update you if something comes up, but we’ve had pretty reliable everything so far. The longest lead is the lanyards, and they’re scheduled to arrive on 9/13.
I was hoping to demo a laser engraver for this week’s meeting, in addition to assembling the last of the preordered Tree of Life badges and prepping the rest for stocking and immediate sale. But Amazon sent me a BabyTrend mini nursery instead of the laser engraver I asked for.
So the agenda for tomorrow evening is: meet at the usual space, work out a minor assembly line, and knock those out. It will be far easier than last time — I should have most of the front boards already assembled before then; and the castellated edge solder method is much, much faster than using pin headers, and leaves the back side of the badge much smoother.
There will also be some discussion of prototyping to try out a feature for next year’s badge. I ordered some Space Dust, but I’m low on other beers, so if Space Dust isn’t for you, and you’re not into Malört, Skrewball or Woodford, consider bringing something.
Meeting at the usual place this evening. Sorry for the late notice. Was traveling, got in late last night, really wasn’t sure what I was up for. But I got hot tweezers and I’m dying to try them out. And some folks who didn’t go to vegas might be interested in badge&stickers show&tell. Also there may be some front-side badge soldering.
Meeting will be hybrid on Discord as well. But you can’t taste Malört through a screen.
Or maybe you can.
If you’re new to the group, hit me up via DM on the Discord or on Twitter if you’re interested in attending. If I met you in LV, mention that. Otherwise, generally we like to get to know people a little bit before inviting them to the private space.
